Duff's Device is an insane optimization originally invented to speed up writes to a serial device. The original is in c, but I wanted to see if I can code it in Perl.

It actually works, with a little kneading and much less of the original 50% performance gain. This is to be expected, because we're emulating pointer arithmetic for (not very) random string access. Another slowdown is the inavailibility of number-only labels. Anyone care to improve on Gaal's Gobbeldygook? <g>

[the assignment to $to in Perl is spurious, of course. Replace it with your particular write_one_char_to_device() function]